


fantasia 2020

by Anonymous



Category: Twisted-Wonderland (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Unreliable Narrator, characters to be added as they appear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26613304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: This recount begins in the ripest of autumns. If possible, I would like to see it through to another.
Kudos: 8
Collections: Anonymous





	1. this journal belongs to

Have you ever heard of a dream journal? Even if you haven’t, it’s not that elusive a concept to deduce from what it says on the tin; a person, awakening from a dreamful sleep, feverishly tries to pin down the etchings of their adrift mind onto physical page before they are forever lost to the night. For what? To scrutinise their repressions with? To savour fondly like a candy you roll over your tongue? Extract some nugget of inspiration from within? I’ve lead an ordinary life up until now. A monotonous one, unfit for creativity. There had been no need to paper the (inaccurate) caricatures of my everyday into acknowledgable existence. 

Until now. 

For one, I can’t wake up from this dream, if it is a dream at all. I guess making a start within the dream is better than never making a start for the foreseeable future. Boredom is incredibly potent.

Which brings me to a second point. 

Two (what is the secondary term of ‘for one?’), should magic truly exist other than as a self-sedation for my pitiable “realities,” my unmerciful “normalities” to which I suppose I’ll have no option but to return to, seeing as inviting as this twisted land may seem, I’m very much aware of how, like a fish out of water, I am mostly reduced to floundering in her ensnaring embrace. Anyways—if in the unlikely circumstance that magic is real, that parallel universes are real, I'd better have some proof of it. Even if it's just for me.

I don't know why I'm trying so hard to write this like a storybook. I suppose I want to give it some sort of proper ceremony, to tell it as it is worth in my head. A well-loved doll you dress up and lay out a picnic with no food for until you're told to let go of it.

P.S. “Like a fish out of water” is probably not the most apt simile in this universe. This is one of the milder and more believable phenomena that can occur here. I will have to come up with some other garbage phrase that isn’t convoluted as “like an octopus watching its entire self-worth vested in unrepentant exploitation of others crumble rightfully into fucking sand.” 

The part of my dream I have stumbled through thus far I will impart to you now. The parts which are yet to come I will do my best to update you on as they go. I just hope you are more of a tortoise than a hare, O Age-Worn Spellbound Tome Which Does Not Open To The Touch Of Any Other Than The Owner That Was On Sale For 720 Madol (Pen Included) And Also Smells Suspiciously Like Cheap Tea. 

It’s getting much colder. I’m glad Grim is pretty much twice the heater a non-monstrous cat is because his ears are constantly aflame. The tradeoff is I must be twice as cautious when scritching them. 

See you in a bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i felt like writing something at a cosy pace for practice/fun/indulgence. thanks for reading this far! also i am painfully unfamiliar with The Big Mouse Tee Em. were i more educated on its works i'd pepper more fun references here and there but alas. :(


	2. unplanned encore

Where to begin? Night Raven College is a castle on a cliff. Night Raven College is a pie in the sky—it doesn’t really matter; the true nature of it will surface eventually as we busy ourselves voyeuristically on a slice of what transpires under its soaring, buttressed roofs, and in the broken up windows of light, chiselled into the arches of its inner courtyards, treasured altars for little secrets. 

Let’s dial it back a bit further, not to stress the anomaly of my own role, but to introduce the one of my most inseparable companion: Grim. How I arrived at this place was run-of-the-mill save for the part that I’m here at all: horse-drawn carriage, embellished casket, oil black robes that moved as viscous as its colour. How Grim stumbled into the campus grounds, the reason behind his dream of becoming a great magician, are still things I have not managed to uncover. We know that he had no family to speak of—not unusual for monsters, though there are monsters which exhibit social behaviour, as I happened upon during a bit of idle research in the library. But we know virtually nothing else. I mean, he can talk, he can summon fire with boastful talent, he’s making encouraging progress in other fields of magic so long as they do not require thumbs, and he has the dietary preferences of a young child that is fixated on canned tuna. 

(According to him, the stones that pop up in the aftermaths of overblots also taste out-of-the-world incredible for him, but more on that later.)

Psychologically, his behaviour is also somewhat akin to that of a young child, leading me to wonder that maybe there is no deep reason behind him coming here other than a vision of the grandiose. Though I would like to say I “take care” of him, it goes without saying that he’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself from the uncounted years of his previous life. Sometimes I wonder if he’s actually right in calling me “kid,” and has existed for way longer than any of us have imagined despite how he behaves, but I’m scared to ask, scared that there is so much he might be intentionally hiding from me, and that I’ll end up with secrets I don’t know what to do with, or that I really am just a speck in his life, a grain in a roll of film. 

Grim found me in the casket, when my upper torso was still caked in blood. The wound between my ribs, and the iron that I had moments earlier felt swimming in my throat, were thankfully no more. Still I did not feel like moving. I mean, I was being hurtled through dimensions. Motion sickness would be an understatement. The room felt like a furnace and my eyes ached with water. Someone was tugging on my clothes, which I had never seen before, telling me to give him them. 

At which point I gritted my teeth and sat up. I threw him off me and told him to leave me alone. There had to be an upper limit of people grabbing at me without so much of a glance at my expression, and I ran and ran and ran, with the flames licking at my heels, into the dark and the desolate. 

Even without looking up, or with my vision blurred into oceans, I knew that the sky of that night had been unbearably clear.


End file.
